6 ms·

People still use our old-fashioned Unix login servers

jstanley 1y ago
So it seems like a "login server" is simply any server you can log in to?
- zevon 1y ago
  In this context, it is a Unix machine configured for general purpose use (so no minimal web-server-centric OS, for example) where everybody in the organisation gets a login (probably automatically and tied to whatever SSO they use). There may also be some niceties installed and/or preconfigured - like software used frequently by this and that research group or auto-mounting the user's file share from the central storage cluster.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I started with UNIX in 1993 with Xenix, have used most well known commercial flavours since then. When I started working, our PC were thin clients for all practical purposes, we had development servers where everyone logged in to work, via telnet or remote X session. Never ever did I heard about login server term as it is being described here.
    - yunohn 1y ago
      I’ve seen this setup in many academic institutions - sometimes also called a jump server too. It handles auth to the rest of the intranet and HPCs, as well as storing the user’s common data like docs, code and dotfiles - shared across all subsequent ssh hosts.
rwmj 1y ago
We have these at work and there was a big outcry when IT tried to get rid of them. I use them from time to time to do things like: Keep git and other backups. Convenient place to scp files to/from. Upload files that coworkers can grab. I don't use it, but others used them as permanent IRC endpoints (using screen or tmux presumably). Notice a cloud VM or container probably doesn't work here. You need something with a permanent presence, and shared between users (with separate Unix accounts).
- userbinator 1y ago
  Using IRC for the company IM is true old-school. I've worked at places which do the same, and also use SIP for A/V calls. Not being dependent on Big Tech, or the Internet for that matter, for services which exist entirely inside the corporate LAN is a great way to work.
  - rwmj 1y ago
    It was replaced by Slack last year. Sigh ... We still use IRC in some upstream communities although it has been replaced by Matrix in some (which is also terrible).
    - ahartmetz 1y ago
      Matrix the protocol seems fine, but client software seems to be all web views or (weirdly) imitating the look of web views.
      - mananaysiempre 1y ago
        Fractal for GNOME is neither, and it’s decent.
        rwmj 1y ago
        I want a text only client, running in a terminal. I don't care that I won't be able to see the pictures & animations - in fact that's an advantage.
        skydhash 1y ago
        The emacs client is nice, ement.el, is nice. And there's probably a weechat plugin somewhere.
        jasonjayr 1y ago
        https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ -- supports matrix (as well as IRC).
PeterStuer 1y ago
Running a remote VScode backend on those while it is technically using the traditional shared server feels like that is not for the "shared" part but just because it is free and available?
- zevon 1y ago
  Free and available is always good (especially in a research environment). ;) The author also says this in the P.S.: "I believe the reason people run IDE backends on our login servers is because they have their code on our fileservers, in their (NFS-mounted) home directories. And in turn I suspect people put the code there partly because they're going to run the code on either or both of our SLURM cluster or the general compute servers."
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Wonder why they dont use git. Maybe a lot of that isn't committed but is large data files?
    - dkdcio 1y ago
      that’s orthogonal, right? they may or may not be using Git regardless of where the files are
      - kfichter 1y ago
        I use VSCode's remote/ssh functionality all the time, particularly when I need to develop code on an environment that's more capable than my local machine (or when my internet is weak). Still use Git, no reason why you'd change that when working on a remote machine.
      - bravesoul2 1y ago
        I mean rather than work off a remote machine for the convenience of having files you can deploy to a compute cluster use git (or maybe scp) to work local and then deploy them when needed. For a lower latency editing experience.
charcircuit 1y ago
Open up other machines to the internet and recommend people upload their code to github instead of the school's file server. People who want to read email can use their web browser to load gmail or outlook depending on what the school goes with. For the cron jobs I would want to know what is being scheduled before providing a recommendation on how you can get rid of the login server for it.
- zevon 1y ago
  Going around a CS research department and asking the population there to justify their cron jobs and other stuff they run sounds like an excellent use of a (rare-ish) university admin / IT staff's time... /s And deal with the ire of Professor Foo (and grad students Bar and Baz) who want/need to use obscure software XYZ and have done so for years (or decades) without any fuss. And build some interface between your HPC clusters and Github. And keeping with regulations and agreements on privacy and security. And so on and so forth. All that for the low, low cost of... Well, certainly not less than keeping and maintaining like one to three unix machines that don't need no fancy hardware or other special attention in the data center you are maintaining anyway?! Why? edit: By the way, from their documentation, the department mentioned by the author runs their own E-Mail-Servers (as many universities do - fortunately, in this world, there often still is a bit more choice than 'use Gmail/Outlook in the browser').
  - SirHumphrey 1y ago
    Because this is something to do and solving real problems is way more annoying. If you work on a smaller cluster in a research institution where in silico work represents only a small portion of the research output the management of the cluster will sometimes be subcontracted out to the general IT support shop. There an administrator - usually with not nearly enough experience will start receiving support requests from users with decades of unix experience which take hours of research to solve. Unable or unwilling (and because inactivity will look bad in the next meeting of department heads) the technician will start working on some "security" matter (so it sounds urgent and important). And this is how elimination of login nodes, cutting internet access to compute nodes, elimination of switches in the offices because they pose security risks (one might be able to connect an additional devices to the network) and implementation of 2FA on pubkey only login servers come in to existence. Most of the cluster operators are wonderful. But a bad one can make a cluster significantly less useful.
teekert 1y ago
Perhaps it is worth noting that all super computers I know (like the Dutch Snellius and the Finnish Lumi) are Slurm clusters with login nodes. Bioinformaticians (among others) in (for example) University Medical Centers won’t get much more bang for the buck than on a well managed Slurm cluster (ie with GPU and Fat nodes etc to distinguish between compute loads). You buy the machines, they are utilized close to 100% over their life time.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  One of the more prominent uses of Slurm to hit the headlines recently is by the data access centres for the LSST data from the Vera Rubin Observatory. Such as the U.S.A. facility in Stanford and the U.K. facility at the University of Edinburgh's Somerville. * https://developer.lsst.io/usdf/batch.html https://developer.lsst.io/usdf/batch.html * https://epcc.ed.ac.uk/hpc-services/somerville https://epcc.ed.ac.uk/hpc-services/somerville But they're all over the place, from the James Hutton Institute to London Imperial. * https://www.cropdiversity.ac.uk https://www.cropdiversity.ac.uk * https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/people/csg/guides/hpcomputing/gpucluster/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/people/csg/guides/hpcom...
- janeway 1y ago
  Yes, I spend a majority of my professional life on similar systems writing code in vim and running massive jobs via slurm. Required for processing TBs of data on secured environments with seamless command line access. I hate web-based connections or vscode type system. Although open to any improvements, this works best to me. It’s like a world inside one’s head with a text-based interface. Graphical data exploration and stats with R, python, etc is a beautiful challenge at that scale.
  - sevensor 1y ago
    Aside from how slow and user hostile it is compared to a text editor, my biggest complaint about vs code is the load it puts on the login node. You get 40 people each running multiple vs code servers and it brings the poor computer to its knees.
somat 1y ago
In this spirit. I had one of those mad inspirations and put together my ideal social network. https://www.public.outband.net https://www.public.outband.net Probably one of the stupider things I have thrown together, But I had fun making it.
nickdothutton 1y ago
This is why I’m setting up a modern shell host community for like minded individuals. Think of it as a high trust social network niche.
- rwmj 1y ago
  Back in the day, Stallman ran a bunch of public servers without any passwords. High trust indeed. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2295/why-did-richard-stallman-recommend-not-to-use-passwords https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2295/why-did-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519009
- JdeBP 1y ago
  Competing with sdf.org, eh? (-:
  - nickdothutton 1y ago
    In some sense perhaps, although I doubt there will ever be more than a couple of thousand members.
- lrvick 1y ago
  Feel free to help further modernize ours running 20+ years! https://hashbang.sh https://hashbang.sh
ValtteriL 1y ago
I ran irssi for a long time on uni servers. One time X forwarding Matlab saved me a hefty sum of money (for a student) as I could complete an assignment remotely. Our admins urged people to nice their processes, but my overthewire password cracking sessions were always killed no matter how nice they were.

So it seems like a "login server" is simply any server you can log in to?

zevon 1y ago
In this context, it is a Unix machine configured for general purpose use (so no minimal web-server-centric OS, for example) where everybody in the organisation gets a login (probably automatically and tied to whatever SSO they use). There may also be some niceties installed and/or preconfigured - like software used frequently by this and that research group or auto-mounting the user's file share from the central storage cluster.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I started with UNIX in 1993 with Xenix, have used most well known commercial flavours since then. When I started working, our PC were thin clients for all practical purposes, we had development servers where everyone logged in to work, via telnet or remote X session. Never ever did I heard about login server term as it is being described here.
  - yunohn 1y ago
    I’ve seen this setup in many academic institutions - sometimes also called a jump server too. It handles auth to the rest of the intranet and HPCs, as well as storing the user’s common data like docs, code and dotfiles - shared across all subsequent ssh hosts.

rwmj 1y ago

We have these at work and there was a big outcry when IT tried to get rid of them. I use them from time to time to do things like: Keep git and other backups. Convenient place to scp files to/from. Upload files that coworkers can grab. I don't use it, but others used them as permanent IRC endpoints (using screen or tmux presumably). Notice a cloud VM or container probably doesn't work here. You need something with a permanent presence, and shared between users (with separate Unix accounts).

userbinator 1y ago
Using IRC for the company IM is true old-school. I've worked at places which do the same, and also use SIP for A/V calls. Not being dependent on Big Tech, or the Internet for that matter, for services which exist entirely inside the corporate LAN is a great way to work.
- rwmj 1y ago
  It was replaced by Slack last year. Sigh ... We still use IRC in some upstream communities although it has been replaced by Matrix in some (which is also terrible).
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    Matrix the protocol seems fine, but client software seems to be all web views or (weirdly) imitating the look of web views.
    - mananaysiempre 1y ago
      Fractal for GNOME is neither, and it’s decent.
      - rwmj 1y ago
        I want a text only client, running in a terminal. I don't care that I won't be able to see the pictures & animations - in fact that's an advantage.
        skydhash 1y ago
        The emacs client is nice, ement.el, is nice. And there's probably a weechat plugin somewhere.
        jasonjayr 1y ago
        https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ -- supports matrix (as well as IRC).

PeterStuer 1y ago

Running a remote VScode backend on those while it is technically using the traditional shared server feels like that is not for the "shared" part but just because it is free and available?

zevon 1y ago
Free and available is always good (especially in a research environment). ;) The author also says this in the P.S.: "I believe the reason people run IDE backends on our login servers is because they have their code on our fileservers, in their (NFS-mounted) home directories. And in turn I suspect people put the code there partly because they're going to run the code on either or both of our SLURM cluster or the general compute servers."
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Wonder why they dont use git. Maybe a lot of that isn't committed but is large data files?
  - dkdcio 1y ago
    that’s orthogonal, right? they may or may not be using Git regardless of where the files are
    - kfichter 1y ago
      I use VSCode's remote/ssh functionality all the time, particularly when I need to develop code on an environment that's more capable than my local machine (or when my internet is weak). Still use Git, no reason why you'd change that when working on a remote machine.
    - bravesoul2 1y ago
      I mean rather than work off a remote machine for the convenience of having files you can deploy to a compute cluster use git (or maybe scp) to work local and then deploy them when needed. For a lower latency editing experience.

charcircuit 1y ago

Open up other machines to the internet and recommend people upload their code to github instead of the school's file server. People who want to read email can use their web browser to load gmail or outlook depending on what the school goes with. For the cron jobs I would want to know what is being scheduled before providing a recommendation on how you can get rid of the login server for it.

zevon 1y ago
Going around a CS research department and asking the population there to justify their cron jobs and other stuff they run sounds like an excellent use of a (rare-ish) university admin / IT staff's time... /s And deal with the ire of Professor Foo (and grad students Bar and Baz) who want/need to use obscure software XYZ and have done so for years (or decades) without any fuss. And build some interface between your HPC clusters and Github. And keeping with regulations and agreements on privacy and security. And so on and so forth. All that for the low, low cost of... Well, certainly not less than keeping and maintaining like one to three unix machines that don't need no fancy hardware or other special attention in the data center you are maintaining anyway?! Why? edit: By the way, from their documentation, the department mentioned by the author runs their own E-Mail-Servers (as many universities do - fortunately, in this world, there often still is a bit more choice than 'use Gmail/Outlook in the browser').
- SirHumphrey 1y ago
  Because this is something to do and solving real problems is way more annoying. If you work on a smaller cluster in a research institution where in silico work represents only a small portion of the research output the management of the cluster will sometimes be subcontracted out to the general IT support shop. There an administrator - usually with not nearly enough experience will start receiving support requests from users with decades of unix experience which take hours of research to solve. Unable or unwilling (and because inactivity will look bad in the next meeting of department heads) the technician will start working on some "security" matter (so it sounds urgent and important). And this is how elimination of login nodes, cutting internet access to compute nodes, elimination of switches in the offices because they pose security risks (one might be able to connect an additional devices to the network) and implementation of 2FA on pubkey only login servers come in to existence. Most of the cluster operators are wonderful. But a bad one can make a cluster significantly less useful.

teekert 1y ago

Perhaps it is worth noting that all super computers I know (like the Dutch Snellius and the Finnish Lumi) are Slurm clusters with login nodes. Bioinformaticians (among others) in (for example) University Medical Centers won’t get much more bang for the buck than on a well managed Slurm cluster (ie with GPU and Fat nodes etc to distinguish between compute loads). You buy the machines, they are utilized close to 100% over their life time.

JdeBP 1y ago
One of the more prominent uses of Slurm to hit the headlines recently is by the data access centres for the LSST data from the Vera Rubin Observatory. Such as the U.S.A. facility in Stanford and the U.K. facility at the University of Edinburgh's Somerville. * https://developer.lsst.io/usdf/batch.html https://developer.lsst.io/usdf/batch.html * https://epcc.ed.ac.uk/hpc-services/somerville https://epcc.ed.ac.uk/hpc-services/somerville But they're all over the place, from the James Hutton Institute to London Imperial. * https://www.cropdiversity.ac.uk https://www.cropdiversity.ac.uk * https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/people/csg/guides/hpcomputing/gpucluster/ https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/people/csg/guides/hpcom...
janeway 1y ago
Yes, I spend a majority of my professional life on similar systems writing code in vim and running massive jobs via slurm. Required for processing TBs of data on secured environments with seamless command line access. I hate web-based connections or vscode type system. Although open to any improvements, this works best to me. It’s like a world inside one’s head with a text-based interface. Graphical data exploration and stats with R, python, etc is a beautiful challenge at that scale.
- sevensor 1y ago
  Aside from how slow and user hostile it is compared to a text editor, my biggest complaint about vs code is the load it puts on the login node. You get 40 people each running multiple vs code servers and it brings the poor computer to its knees.

somat 1y ago

In this spirit. I had one of those mad inspirations and put together my ideal social network. https://www.public.outband.net https://www.public.outband.net Probably one of the stupider things I have thrown together, But I had fun making it.

nickdothutton 1y ago

This is why I’m setting up a modern shell host community for like minded individuals. Think of it as a high trust social network niche.

rwmj 1y ago
Back in the day, Stallman ran a bunch of public servers without any passwords. High trust indeed. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2295/why-did-richard-stallman-recommend-not-to-use-passwords https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2295/why-did-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519009
JdeBP 1y ago
Competing with sdf.org, eh? (-:
- nickdothutton 1y ago
  In some sense perhaps, although I doubt there will ever be more than a couple of thousand members.
lrvick 1y ago
Feel free to help further modernize ours running 20+ years! https://hashbang.sh https://hashbang.sh

ValtteriL 1y ago

I ran irssi for a long time on uni servers. One time X forwarding Matlab saved me a hefty sum of money (for a student) as I could complete an assignment remotely. Our admins urged people to nice their processes, but my overthewire password cracking sessions were always killed no matter how nice they were.